Attitude

Attitude : A set of emotions beliefs and behaviours towards a particular object, person, issue or event

→ consistent way in which we operate

→ Attitude can be:

• Positive: liking for a person, object, issue or event

• Negative: dislike for a person, object, issue or event

• Neutral: not interested in having an attitude to the person, object, issue or event

• Ambivalent: having both positive and negative attitudes to the person, object, issue or event

→ Structure of Attitude: ABC Model

• Affective : Talking about our emotions

• Cognitive : Talking about the way we think

• Behavioural : Talking about the way we act

  → often in agreement with the affective and cognitive part of attitude, but not always due to:

  • factors within an attitude (strength, accessibility, specificity, ambivalence)

  • personality (high / low self monitors)

  • outside factors such as social pressures

• change in one component often leads to change in others

• Example Model:

  → Affect: Football makes me feel disgust |

  → Behaviour: I don’t go to football | Components of a negative attitude

  → Cognition: I think football is a waste of time |

Workbook Exercises for Attitude:

• Attitude Towards Smoking:

  → Feel like its gross

  → Doesn’t smoke

  → Smoking harms your health

• Attitude Towards Tattoos

  → I like tattoos

  → I get a tattoo

  → Tattoo’s help me express my identity and individuality

• Attitude Towards Fitness and Exercise

  → I dislike having to exercise as it hurts

  → I exercise though

  → Exercise helps mental strength and physical wellbeing

Persuasion / Attitude Change

Persuasion : The art of convincing others to change their attitudes or behaviours

→ process by which a persons attitudes or behaviour are influenced by communication from other people

• Examples include advertising and political persuasion

→ Theories of Persuasion Relating to External Factors that Affects Persuasion

• Yale Attitude Change Approach: Message content, source and audience characteristics affecting persuasion

  • The Source - WHO

    • expert

    • attractive

    • likeable

    • fast talking

    • trustworthy

    • powerful

    • similar to the audience

  • The Message (content) - WHAT

    • strong emotions

    • statistical / factual information

    • repetitive

    • genuine

    • two sided

    • novel ideas

  • The Audience - WHOM

    • deep thinking people (can relate to string arguments)

    • high self monitors

    • younger people (older people usually have set pre-existing attitudes)

    • low esteem people

• Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM): Central and peripheral routes to persuasion

  → Central route to persuasion

  • Method: (FIIRM)

    • facts and statistics provide detail information

    • intellectual processing is required to think carefully about the information and evaluate it

    • intelligence and cognitive capacity are required to follow the arguments presented

    • reason is used to argue the point of interest

    • motivation is required to pay attention to the arguments

    • long lasting persuasion

  • Characteristics of good persuasion

    • The attitude change is likely to be permanent because the processing is deep and thorough

    • The persuasive argument may be come part of the audiences belief structure

  → Peripheral route to persuasion

  • Characteristics:

    • beauty / attractiveness

    • short lived / temporary persuasion

    • fame

    • similarity

    • pleasure

    • novelty

    • fun

    • few information given (facts and statistics)

    • few intellectual opinions

    • little use for:

      • cognitive capacity,

      • intelligence

      • motivation to think

      • reason

• Experience Model: Direct / indirect experience

  → Direct Experience

  • Event happens to individual

  • quite strong change in attitude

  • long lasting persuasion

  → Indirect Experience

  • Event happens to someone else

  • less effect on change in attitude

  • temporary persuasion

→ Strategies of Persuasion

• Norm of reciprocity (what you give, you get back)

  → Social norm that involves in-kind exchanges between people - responding to another’s action with another equivalent action (can be both positive and negative)

• Door in the face (ridiculous thing, say no, smaller thing, feel guilty so say yes)

  → An unreasonably large request is asked before making a smaller one that is more likely to be agreed to

• Foot in the door (small thing, say yes, bigger thing, say yes more)

  → A smaller offer is made first to coerce them and then bigger offers are made throughout to increase the likelihood of agreement

Various factors influence attitude formation and / or attitude change

Accessibility : easily related to strength and can be brought to mind quickly if in convenience

Specificity : quite particular to the situation at hand